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What is Open Access and why 
should you care? 
Alma Swan 
DIrector of Advocacy Programmes, SPARC Europe 
Director, Key Perspectives Ltd 
Convenor, Enabling Open Scholarship 
Open Access Seminar, Bergen, Norway, 25/26 September 2013 
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Shape of this presentation 
Some context 
OA benefits for authors 
OA benefits for institutions and funders 
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Some context 
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Mandatory policies 
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Open Access 
Immediate 
Free (to use) 
Free (of restrictions) 
Access to the peer-reviewed literature (and data) 
Not vanity publishing 
Not a ‘stick anything up on the Web’ approach 
Moving scholarly communication into the Web Age 
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Open Access – Why? 
Research moves faster and more efficiently 
Greater visibility and impact 
Better monitoring, assessment and evaluation of 
research 
Enables new semantic technologies (text-mining and 
data-mining) 
Publicly-funded research should be freely available 
to the ‘public’ 
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Open Access: how 
Open Access journals 
(www.doaj.org)  
Open Access repositories 
Open Access monographs 
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Open Access journals 
Content available free of charge online 
In many cases, free of restrictions on use too 
Some charge at the ‘front end’ 
More than half do not levy a charge at all 
Around 8500 of them 
Listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals 
(DOAJ: www.doaj.org) 
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Open Access repositories 
Digital collections 
Most usually institutional 
Sometimes centralised (subject-based) 
Interoperable 
Form a network across the world 
Create a global database of openly-accessible 
research 
Currently c2500 
Supplement subscription-access publishing 
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Here’s one 
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What’s in it for authors? 
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Author advantages from Open Access 
Visibility 
Usage 
Impact 
Personal profiling and marketing 
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Visibility 
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An author’s own testimony on open 
access visibility 
 
   “Self-archiving in the PhilSci Archive 
has given instant world-wide visibility 
to my work. As a result, I was invited to 
submit papers to refereed international 
conferences/journals and got them 
accepted.” 
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Professor Martin Skitmore  
School of Urban Design, QUT 
“There is no doubt in my mind that ePrints will have 
improved things – especially in developing countries such 
as Malaysia … many more access my papers who 
wouldn’t have thought of contacting me personally in the 
‘old’ days. 
 
While this may … increase … citations, the most 
important thing … is that at least these people can find 
out more about what others have done…” 
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Usage 
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University of Liege repository: 
authors deposit 
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And the material gets used 
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Individual article usage 
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Individual authors’ usage 
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Individual authors’ usage 
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Impact 
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Impact 
0 50 100 150 200 250
Biology
Economics
Political Sci
Health Sci
Business
Education
Management
Law
Psychology
Sociology
Physics
% increase in citations with Open Access 
Range = 36%-200% 
(Data: Stevan Harnad and co-workers) 
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What OA means for a 
researcher’s citation impact 
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Top authors (by download) 
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Ray Frost’s impact 
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Top authors (by download) 
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Martin Skitmore 
(Urban Design) 
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Engineering 
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
20
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
OA
Non-OA
Data: Gargouri & Harnad, 2010 
C
ita
tio
ns
 
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Clinical medicine 
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
OA
Non-OA
C
ita
tio
ns
 
Data: Gargouri & Harnad, 2010 
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Social science 
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
OA
Non-OA
C
ita
tio
ns
 
Data: Gargouri & Harnad, 2010 
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Profiling and marketing 
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Melissa Terras 
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For institutions? 
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Institutional and funder advantages  
from Open Access 
Visibility, usage 
Impact 
Profiling and marketing 
Outreach to the public: demonstrating 
social return 
Economic benefits 
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“I am asked how many articles my 
researchers publish each year, and I 
have to say ‘I have no idea!’”  
Professor Bernard Rentier, Rector, University of Liege, 
Belgium, explaining one of the reasons why he has built an 
institutional Open Access repository and introduced a 
mandatory policy on Open Access 
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MIT’s repository usage 
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Webometrics 
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The public 
Independent researchers 
Education sector 
Professional community 
Practitioner community 
Interested ‘lay’ public 
Business sector, including innovative 
SMEs 
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PubMed Central 
2 million full-text articles 
420,000 unique users per day: 
• 25% universities 
• 18% government and others 
• 40% citizens 
• 17% companies 
 
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Economic implications in Denmark 
Access to research articles is very/extremely important: 
48% 
79% have access difficulties 
Difficulties in searching/accessing articles: €73m per year 
to researchers in Danish firms 
Average delay to product or process development without 
access to academic research: 2.2 years 
For new products: €4.8 million per company 
Houghton, Swan & Brown, 2011 
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EU CIS studies 
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Total Research Income: QUT and sector 
Data:  Tom Cochrane, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, QUT 
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
2004 2005 2006 2007
All univs QUT
%
 in
cr
ea
se
 
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
2003-2007
All univs QUT
%
 in
cr
ea
se
 
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Senior Lecturer, Design, QUT 
“Just last week, the General Manager of 
Sustainable Development from an 
Australian rural industry called me – based 
on reading one of my research papers in 
ePrints.   
He loved what he read ..... and we are now 
in discussion about how we can help them 
measure their industry’s social impacts.” 
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It is one of the noblest duties of a 
university to advance knowledge 
and to diffuse it, not merely among 
those who can attend the daily 
lectures, but far and wide.  
Daniel Coit Gilman  
First President, Johns Hopkins University 
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Thank you for listening 
aswan@keyperspectives.co.uk 
 
www.keyperspectives.co.uk  
 
www.openoasis.org